Hello Melos, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique.

Starting with your organic forms these are sticking more closely to the characteristics of simple sausage forms than your lesson 2 pages, and you’re doing a good job of keeping your linework smooth and confident.

The main point that stands out here is that as far as I can tell, you don’t appear to be making a conscious effort to vary the degree of your contour curves, which is noted in the instructions as a common mistake.

Keep in mind that the degree of your contour lines should be shifting wider as we slide along the sausage form, moving farther away from the viewer. This is also influenced by the way in which the sausages themselves turn in space, but farther = wider is a good rule of thumb to follow. If you're unsure as to why that is, review the Lesson 1 ellipses video. You can also see a good example of how to vary your contour curves in this diagram showing the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived.

Moving on to your insect constructions there’s a fair bit that you’re handling well here. I’m happy to see that you’ve kept most of your linework fairly smooth, confident and purposeful, and that you usually start your constructions with simple solid forms such as balls, sausages, or branches.

There are a few things I want to bring to your attention to help you get more out of your constructions as you move forwards. The first of these relates to differentiating between the actions we can take when interacting with a construction, which fall into two groups:

  • Actions in 2D space, where we're just putting lines down on a page, without necessarily considering the specific nature of the relationships between the forms they're meant to represent and the forms that already exist in the scene.

  • Actions in 3D space, where we're actually thinking about how each form we draw exists in 3D space, and how it relates to the existing 3D structures already present. We draw them in a manner that actually respects the 3D nature of what's already there, and even reinforces it.

Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose, but many of those marks would contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.

For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

For example, I've marked on your rhino beetle in red an area where it looks like you cut back inside the silhouette of a form you had already drawn. On the head of your grasshopper it looks like this happened accidentally along the upper edge, where there was a gap between lines passing around your ellipse, and you chose the inner line to serve as the silhouette of the ball form you were constructing. This unfortunately does leave some stray marks outside of its silhouette, which does create some visual issues. Generally it is best to treat the outermost perimeter of the ellipse as the edge of the silhouette, so everything else remains contained within it. This diagram shows which lines to use on a loose ellipse.

While you don’t cut back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn all that much, you are very prone to extending off existing forms in 2D. On the beetle I marked in blue some places where you'd extended off existing forms using partial, flat shapes, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space. While this approach worked fine for adding edge detail to leaves in the previous lesson, this is because leaves are paper-thin structures, so essentially they are already flat and altering their silhouette won’t flatten them further. When we want to build on forms that aren’t already flat we need to use another strategy.

Instead, when we want to build on our construction or alter something we add new 3D forms to the existing structure. Forms with their own complete silhouettes - and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. We can do this either by defining the intersection between them with contour lines (like in lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here.

This is all part of understanding that everything we draw is 3D, and therefore needs to be treated as such in order for both you and the viewer to believe in that lie.

There are some places in your work where you are already employing this additive 3D construction pretty well, the spikes on the abdomen of this spider are complete 3D forms with a solid connection to the existing structure. I’ll share some examples of this in practice with this beetle horn demo, as well as this ant head demo. You can also see some good examples of this in the lobster and shrimp demos on the informal demos page. As Uncomfortable has been pushing this concept more recently, it hasn't been fully integrated into the lesson material yet (it will be when the overhaul reaches Lesson 4). Until then, those submitting for official critiques basically get a preview of what is to come.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you tried out lots of different strategies for constructing legs. It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't actually seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy.

The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown in these examples here, and here. This tactic can be used extensively to develop the specific complexity of each particular leg, as shown in this example of an ant leg. I’ll also show how this can be applied to animals in this dog leg demo as the sausage method should be used throughout lesson 5.

Just in case you’re unsure how you might be straying from the specifics of the sausage method in your work, I’ve made a step by step example for you here.

  • You need to start with simple sausage forms. Not complex forms, not partial shapes. The characteristics of simple sausage forms are introduced in the organic forms exercise and reiterated on the sausage method diagram. Stick to two round ends of equal size, connected by a bendy tube of consistent width. You need to complete each form, and make sure they overlap at the joints.

  • Once your sausages are in place we need to show how they connect together in 3D space. We do this by drawing a contour line at each joint, just like the contour lines introduced in the form intersections exercise in lesson 2. This shows how the forms penetrate one another, creating specific 3D relationships between them and reinforcing the solidity of the construction.

  • As most creatures' legs don’t actually look like a chain of sausages, is is usually necessary to add more forms to create any extra lumps, bumps, spikes or other complexity we observe in the reference.

The last thing I wanted to mention is a reminder to be sure to give each drawing as much time as it requires - not just for drawing, but for observing your reference as well. There are cases here and there where you oversimplify a little too much in ways that it suggests you could probably benefit from pushing yourself to spend more time looking at your reference, specifically doing so continuously throughout the drawing process, rather than only up-front. For example if we look at your dragonfly you’ve left almost everything at the simplest possible stage, the thorax in particular is hugely oversimplified, there is a lot more going on in your reference image that you could reasonably attempt to construct. There’s also segmentation on the abdomen, and edge detail present on the wings. There are similar issues marked on your beetle here where you’d left some strange gaps between the thorax and abdomen that didn’t appear to be based on the information in your reference, and omitted some fairly easily observable additional forms. Sometimes students may feel rushed to complete some drawings faster, simply because they only have a certain amount of time in a given sitting. If you ever feel yourself pressured to work faster than you need, remember that you can always set a drawing down and pick it up another day. No need to call it done the moment you get up.

All right, I’ve explained a few things you can do to improve your constructions, but you will have ample opportunity to address these points as you tackle your animal constructions in the next lesson, so I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Please make sure you refer to this critique as you do your lesson 5 pages, the information I have provided here can (and should) be applied to your animal constructions.